Paul Morand

Paul Morand (Paris, 1888 – Paris, 1976) was a French diplomat and writer whose short stories and novellas were admired for their elegant style and sharp view of high society. His most productive period came between the two World Wars, and he is considered an early modernist. He combined a diplomatic career with a literary one, and his political conduct during the Second World War remains a subject of debate.

The son of an official with close ties to the arts, he grew up in a household frequented by sculptors, writers and poets from Mallarmé's circle. His uncle Abel Combarieu helped him join the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1912, and his tutor Jean Giraudoux became a lifelong friend. In London he met Marcel Proust, whose friendship shaped his first steps as a writer. His early verse appeared in 1919, but he truly entered literature in 1921 with Tendres stocks, which carried a preface by Proust.

In the 1920s and 1930s he published stories, novellas and travel diaries that described, with precision, the settings, rituals and customs of the European upper middle class. His prose was brilliant and biting, with a humour close to that of Oscar Wilde, and it revealed a pessimism and a belief in social hierarchy that modern readers approach with caution.

During the war he aligned himself with the Vichy regime and was appointed ambassador to Romania in 1943, and later to Bern. After the war he lived in exile in Switzerland for about ten years, and from there he became a patron of a new generation of writers, the so-called Hussards, who were anti-Gaullist and opposed to existentialism. He was elected to the Académie française in 1968, although the head of state did not receive him.

Today he is remembered as a skilled prose writer who portrayed the European elite between the wars with irony, but also as an author whose political positions still weigh on how he is read.